NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 21, 2025

● Serial, the famous podcast shop that’s now part of The New York Times, is the latest to examine the enormous harm to children done by some child abuse pediatricians. But if you think you already know the story, at least check out Part 3 – because it looks at a bigger issue: The terrible harm done to children when agencies think tearing apart a family is ok because it’s “erring on the side of the child” or “better safe than sorry.” 

● Yes, but those who cling to “better safe than sorry” claim that at least if we throw them in foster care they won’t die. The next time you hear it, you might want to show the speaker a study from Sweden that shows where children really are more likely to die – more than four times more likely, in fact. I have a blog post with the answer, along with a link to the study. 

● KNXV-TV reports that in Arizona, a state that still tears apart families at a rate well above the national average, “Since 2016, state records show DCS has paid out more than $30 million to settle lawsuits involving children.” The most common allegation: wrongful removal. 

● In Maine, private contractors are hired by the state family police agency to arrange visits after children are taken from their parents. The first visit is supposed to be arranged within seven days. That’s actually far too long, especially for the youngest children. But the Maine Monitor reports that one of the contractors met the deadline less than half the time.  That almost certainly would have been the story’s lead – except that another contractor, the largest, met the deadline only ten percent of the time.  The state renewed that vendor's contract anyway. 

As one guardian ad litem put it: 

“Babies being removed and then not being allowed to see the parent that they’ve just begun bonding with, that’s horrific. But a child of any age needs to see their parent again.” 

And then there was the case in which a judge said the failure to arrange visits between a mother and her child was “simply not acceptable.” But she terminated the child’s right to ever live with the mother ever again anyway. 

Because this is Maine. And in Maine, which takes away children at one of the highest rates in the nation, whether you’re a contractor or the family police agency, you can do pretty much whatever you damn well please to any family you want to do it to, and there’s no penalty. 

● WANF-TV in Atlanta reports “A Cherokee County mother has been cleared by child welfare officials after false positive drug test results nearly separated her from her children.” 

● In Oklahoma, KWTV reports, a lawmaker who wants to raise the standard of evidence before children can be torn from their families got support from some surprising places – in fact, even from a CASA.  From the story:

 At last week’s interim study, attorney Phillip Owens, who is a foster parent himself, said many parents face unfair court battles. "Most of the deprived cases that I handle don’t involve any kind of a criminal charge," Owens said. “Way too many judges in this state take DHS at their word." 

Tulsa-based private investigator Eric Cullen echoed that statement. "There’s just no compromise. It’s black and white," Cullen said. "It’s really harsh; it’s a little draconian, frankly.” 

Jennifer Ballew is a court-appointed special advocate who is assigned to child welfare cases by judges. She said policy changes are necessary. "The policies of DHS do not lead in the direction of reunification," Ballew said. 

Two columns in The Imprint shed new light on chronic family police system failures: 

● From Shellie Taggart and Wendy Mota of Futures Without Violence: A reminder of how the system makes things infinitely worse for survivors of domestic violence and their children. They write: 

CPS continues to rely on a vast surveillance network of mandated reporters to bring survivors of domestic violence into the system, where their protective strategies are often misinterpreted as neglect. Their lives are constrained by unnecessary services, and too often their children are removed for ‘failure to protect.’ This practice continues despite the obvious harms caused by the system and extensive evidence that a loving parent-child bond is a critical protective factor for healing from trauma. 

●Ericka Hickey writes about how she was separated from her siblings in foster care – but she notes an extra level of cruelty. She writes: 

The most painful part of my story isn’t that I was separated from my sisters. It’s that I was only brought around when it served someone else’s goals, when it made their job easier, or fulfilled a requirement — not because our bond mattered and should have been honored and protected. 

● NCCPR’s commentary, behind a paywall in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, begins this way: 

Faced with horrifying child abuse deaths, often in cases that were well known to child protective services agencies, there are two ways to respond: Determine what went wrong case-by-case and do the hard work necessary to fix the problems so they never happen again. Or just scapegoat efforts to keep families together and embrace what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. …

 The first approach leads to safer children; the second makes for great politics. Unfortunately, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Janet Kelly, chose the second.

Death at an early age: A Swedish study finds it’s FOUR TIMES more likely for those who’ve been in foster care

Our entire massive child welfare surveillance state – a system so omnipresent that it will investigate the families of one-third of all American children and more than half of Black children – was never built on science. It didn’t grow based on research showing that this approach will make children safer. 

It was fed, and grew to its current monstrous proportions, almost exclusively on horror stories. 

Over and over, child abuse fatalities among children “known to the system,” horrors as rare as they are tragic, were exploited to call for ever more investigations and the removal of ever more children to foster care.  It never worked; but that never mattered. 

As we have begun to catch on, as some states have passed laws curbing the reach of the child welfare surveillance state, the invocation of horror stories has become even more desperate. Think of that one person to whom your local media turn time and time again. Maybe it’s your “Senator (or Representative) Soundbite” – the state legislators who worm their way into every story. Maybe it’s the state child welfare ombudsman or “child advocate.” Maybe it’s the head of a trade association for group homes or residential treatment centers. Sometimes, sadly, it’s the journalists themselves. 

The message is always the same - some version of: If you don’t investigate even more families and take away even more children, more children will die! 

The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero. But there is no evidence that exploiting such fatalities to create the current system, no evidence that investigating ever more families, and no evidence that taking away more children, has ever done a damn thing to curb child deaths – even as it caused enormous collateral damage. And now there is evidence that the system itself may cause more children to die. 

The evidence comes in the form of a stunning study from Sweden. The study determined the fate of children involved in 21,000 cases, comparing those placed in foster care to comparably- maltreated children left in their own homes. (Note the part about comparably-maltreated. No, the foster youth did not suffer from worse abuse or neglect than those left at home.) Here's a link to the full study.

The result: By age 20, those who had endured time in foster care were more likely to die. Not just a little more likely to die – more than four times more likely to die. 

Of course, percentages don’t mean a lot if the raw numbers are low. But the raw numbers are not low.  Among children left in their own homes 1.8% died by age 20. Among those who were forced into foster care, 8.6% died by age 20, a figure the study author calls “staggering.” 

She writes: 

This effect is mainly driven by suicides that occur while the removed children are still placed in out-of-home care. There is a sharp and persistent increased risk of suicide already within nine months after the court’s decision. The empirical evidence suggests that unfavorable care conditions and harmful exposure to peers serve as important explanations. 

Among other things, this is still more evidence that the “residential treatment center” model, in which children said to have serious mental health problems are thrown together right when they are most vulnerable to peer pressure, is, well, insane. And there certainly is nothing to suggest that “care conditions” in the United States are more favorable than in Sweden – not when you consider all the exposes of residential treatment and all those studies showing high rates of abuse in American foster care. 

This is, of course, on top of all the other studies, one after another after another, finding all sorts of terrible outcomes for foster youth when, in typical cases, children placed in foster care are compared to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.  

No, this doesn’t mean no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it means family policing systems need to be a whole lot more careful about whom they police. They need to be a whole lot more certain that there is danger in the home so great that it outweighs the risk of abuse in foster care, and the risk that the children will kill themselves in foster care. 

All the Senator (and Representative) Soundbites across the country, all the “Child Advocates” and all the others who exploit child abuse deaths to panic us into throwing more and more children into foster care need to stop and consider: To the extent that they succeed, is it their own rhetoric that, however unintentionally, is really putting children at risk?

NCCPR in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: A take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare makes kids less safe

Faced with horrifying child abuse deaths, often in cases that were well known to child protective services agencies, there are two ways to respond: Determine what went wrong case-by-case and do the hard work necessary to fix the problems so they never happen again. Or just scapegoat efforts to keep families together and embrace what amounts to a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. …

Read the full column (behind a paywall) in the Richmond Times-Dispatch

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 14, 2025

This week’s round-up begins with exposés of foster care horrors from one end of the country to the other: 

● I have a blog post about lessons from a Honolulu Civil Beat series published two weeks ago on what was aptly called the “Lord of the Flies” foster home. At one point, when a caseworker in Hawaii was warned about problems in the home, she replied: “When you’re looking for a foster home for teenage boys, you take what you can get.” 

● Last week, the Boston Globe exposed the horrors of Massachusetts group homes. It described how hundreds of young people run from them, often because they think they’ll be safer in the streets. One runaway recalls being told by a caseworker: “We have nowhere else for you to go, Alexia. You have to go. Get in the car.” 

As long as Massachusetts tears apart families at a rate 44% above the national average, runaways are going to keep hearing that from caseworkers. 

● And in Colorado here’s a story from KCNC Denver about a “residential treatment center” where children are “desperate to escape.” The fact that Colorado officials, and some journalists, are in love with institutionalizing children doesn’t help. 

● While in Baltimore, a family was desperate to get help for their teenager’s mental health problems. Instead of providing Wraparound services to the teen could remain safely at home, the state threw her into foster care and wound up placing her in a hotel. WMAR-TV reports on what happened next.  As Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore pointed out in this earlier WMAR story: 

… the money spent on hotel stays and one-on-one services, would be better spent helping to reunite family including providing wraparound services. 

“Most of the cases that we see are neglect, not abuse, and a lot of those cases are based on poverty,” she said. “We take their children and then pay foster parents to take care of the children when we could take that same money and pay the parents to help them find stable housing and reduce the trauma on everyone and not for nothing, reduce the burden on the court system, on all these attorneys and case workers that are part of the system” 

● There’s better news from Michigan, where the state’s Court of Appeals ruled that, no, you can’t tear children from their families forever just because a caseworker thinks the family’s housing is too small. (And yes, the Michigan family police agency really tries to do things like that.) 

● And back in Colorado, there’s also some better news. The Denver Post reports that, after the state got rid of some of its hypertechnical foster home licensing requirements, there’s been a significant increase in kinship foster care placements with relatives. 

● For The Imprint, Alexis Kramer writes about having to fight multiple stereotypes when she faces a family police agency: 

For me, being a Black autistic mother raising Black autistic children has created a unique set of challenges when dealing with CPS. Each identity carries stereotypes, and when those stereotypes combine, they often lead to increased surveillance, harsher judgments, and less support. This is the reality that many neurodivergent families of color live through, though it is rarely acknowledged.

Lessons from Hawaii’s “Lord of the Flies” foster home

It went on for decades. Rampant sexual abuse in the Hawaii foster home of John Teixeira. Caseworkers failed to check on the children. Not only did the state family police agency ignore complaints, they praised Teixeira to the skies – because, after all, there’s always a “shortage” of foster homes, and Teixeira would take children no one else would.  And it wasn’t just the family police agency. Teixeira also was subject to one of those treacly “model foster parent” stories that so many reporters seem to love. 

The horrors finally were exposed thanks to a civil lawsuit by one brave former foster youth, and dogged reporting from Honolulu Civil Beat. 

How bad was it? From one of the stories: 

“Life for a young boy in the Teixeira foster home was a struggle for survival akin to ‘Lord of the Flies,’” the judge in JR’s lawsuit wrote in 2024, referring to the classic novel about castaway children creating a savage society. “The older boys were abusive and Defendant Teixeira, an abuser himself, failed to protect younger boys from them.” 

One of those who tried to warn the family police agency 

… said she tried to tell the social worker that she didn’t think the boys were being treated right in Teixeira’s home. 

She testified that she vividly recalls the social worker’s response. 

“When you’re looking for a foster home for teenage boys, you take what you can get.” 

But that, of course, is because systems tear apart so many families needlessly in the first place. 

And reporter John Hill doesn’t let the family police agency get away with the usual excuse: Oh, that was long ago, we do much better now.  Hill writes: 

The story is a microcosm of what was happening to foster children across Hawaiʻi in the 1990s and 2000s — and, evidence suggests, to this day. [Emphasis added.] 

You can read all about what happened to children placed with Teixeira in the series itself; I won’t recap it here, just be sure you’re ready for it. 

Instead, I want to focus on something mentioned at the very beginning of the series. How JR wound up in foster care in the first place: 

The 8-year-old boy who would later be known as John Roe 121 arrived at his new foster home in Waimānalo in the midst of a crisis. 

JR and his siblings had been taken from their biological parents three years earlier after his mother accidentally hit his brother on the head with a hammer in the midst of being attacked by the children’s drug-addled father. 

OK, let’s stop there. What might have happened had Hawaii authorities removed the drug-addled father instead of the children? No, just doing that and closing the door wouldn’t have been enough. But what if they’d then helped JR’s mother cope with all that had been done to her – both the psychological help agencies love to dispense and the concrete help she almost certainly needed?  What if they’d at least tried that first? 

And before you say: Wait, you wanted the state to try keeping the children in a home like that? Read the stories to see what happened to JR when they didn’t. 

But that was only the first mistake. When children genuinely can’t stay with their own parents, the best choice almost always is another relative. But Hawaii authorities quickly gave up on that: 

[The children] stayed for a short time with an aunt. When state child welfare workers showed up, the aunt told 5-year-old JR and two younger siblings to hide in a closet. But they made too much noise. 

The social workers opened the closet door and took them away. 

Then came another placement that was not as bad as a total stranger. But, as one might expect, given what he’d been through, JR’s behavior was getting difficult. The state could have provided wraparound services to save that placement. But instead… 

JR’s next stop was with a neighbor of his mother. Separated from his siblings, he spent three years with her. Now she was telling the state she could no longer handle him. 

So JR was moved from home to home to home – eventually winding up in the “Lord of the Flies” home.  

And then the state family policing agency blew it again: 

… when a relative expressed interest in adopting JR, state officials declined. Teixeira, they said, was JR’s “best advocate,” according to the later expert witness report. 

So, JR had a home. Teixeira had solved a problem for the state, as he had many times before — where to put foster boys no one else wanted. 

Another story is even more tragic. It’s the story of Rahiem Morris. 

Rahiem’s dad had a drug problem. He separated from the boy’s mother. Then the mother, Sharon Fernandez-Thomas, was arrested for contacting her husband’s new girlfriend, violating a court order. 

She pleaded no contest and was sentenced to community service. And CWS took Rahiem, who was 4, severing her parental rights. 

Then Rahiem’s mother remarried, moved to the mainland and lost track of him. 

There is nothing to indicate Rahiem’s mother abused or neglected him; so there’s no indication there was anything wrong that couldn’t have been fixed without taking Rahiem at all, let alone terminating his right to live with his mother for his entire childhood. 

After Raheim aged out, mother and son found either other again. Children who age out often go back to the parents the state tried to keep from them forever.  But by then, too much damage had been done to Raheim in foster care, particularly at the “Lord of the Flies” home. 

There is only one piece of encouraging news here: It looks like in 2023 and 2024, Hawaii finally got serious about taking away fewer children (though, as always, we don’t know how much of the decline is real and how much is just a shift to hidden foster care.) If it’s real, then, in 2024, for the first time in more than 20 years, the rate at which Hawaii took away children was no worse than the national average – though that average is itself too high. 

That means for the first time, if the family police agency builds on this progress, maybe Hawaii foster children won’t have to “take what [they] can get.”

NCCPR in the Kansas Reflector: Yes, there’s a way to make child abuse horrors less common in Kansas — but it’s not what you think

 A child dies a gruesome death. The child was “known to the system.” In fact, the case file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. That leaves everyone asking: “How could it have happened?” 

The answer is counterintuitive. 

Tragedies like the death of Zoey Felix, who was killed after slipping through the cracks, happen in every state. But they are more likely to happen in Kansas. That’s because Kansas has embraced an approach to child welfare that can be boiled down to: Take the child and run. Kansas tears apart so many families needlessly that workers have less time to find those very few children — like Zoey — who really do need to be taken. … 

Read the full column in the Kansas Reflector

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 7, 2025

● A North Carolina agency wants us to believe that the best way to help impoverished parents whose children have been taken because of alleged abuse or neglect is to hand the children over to stranger couples and pay those stranger couples $100,000 a year - plus fringe benefits, free housing and more! The state family police agency loves it – in part, they say, because paying that much is a great way to stop foster parents from undermining reunification!  In this NCCPR Blog post, we offer some alternative suggestions.   

● Spotlight PA reports on the enormous harm done to children and families by a system that makes it incredibly easy to blacklist parents as child abusers, and incredibly difficult to get off the blacklist.  There is a lawsuit pending to try to change this, and also legislation. 

● The Indiana Capital Chronicle tells us the litany of pathetic excuses offered up by the head of Indiana’s family police agency for the 30% increase in the number of children torn from their families in 2024 compared to the previous year. The story also includes NCCPR’s perspective. 

● NCCPR joined with two outstanding advocates from Maine to discuss that state’s system in a presentation to the 2025 Kempe Center International Conference. Here’s the text of two of the presentations. 

●You know your family policing agency is out of control when even a local CASA demands changes that would put more emphasis on reunification. KWTV reports that’s what happened at a hearing in Oklahoma. 

● From NCCPR’s commentary in the Rhode Island Current: 

If the fact that Rhode Island’s child welfare system wastes lives isn’t enough to prompt real change, consider the staggering waste of money. New data show Rhode Island spending on child welfare is proportionately the highest rate in the nation — well over triple the national average. 

The amount is equal to $11,244 for every impoverished child in the state. Rhode Island’s children would be far better off if the state could simply give every impoverished family $11,244 per child.

 In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions:

● Honolulu Civil Beat reports on a Hawaii Supreme Court decision that will force the state family police agency to release records in a horrific case in which a foster child was allegedly, in effect, adopted-to-death.  But what is most interesting is the incredible lengths the agency went to in an effort to conceal those records: 

DHS explained that since the girl had not been officially declared dead, her case was not subject to disclosure under the federal law. 

After a judge declared her dead, DHS said it still wouldn’t release the information because the judge had not specified that she died of abuse. 

● From KFOR-TV, Oklahoma City: 

A metro father is suing after his one-year-old was kidnapped by a former Oklahoma Human Services worker. 

Earlier this year, Xander Faison was a DHS hotline worker and used fake papers to remove a child and take her to her own apartment.